Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen, left) and Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) are two friends hired to police a small town in the western Appaloosa. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Ed Harris directed himself as the furious painter Jackson Pollock in Pollock, and does the same as a vigilante gunslinger in the wild west of Appaloosa, but with less success. It’s not a sin to feel twice compelled to tell the story of a self-valourizing alpha male, but did Harris really need to sing the song that runs over Appaloosa’s closing credits? That’s a sure sign of a vanity project, y’all.

Ed Harris’s first direction appears to have been: “Your leading man should work with Viggo Mortensen again, like he did in A History of Violence.” Mortensen agreed. He plays Everett Hitch and Harris is Virgil Cole, two laconic buddies on horseback who move from place to place as cowboys for hire. Their latest commission is to return law and order to a New Mexico town in the clutches of an unscrupulous rancher played by Jeremy Irons. (Irons is too scrawny and too British for the role; Mortensen could open that square jaw and swallow him like an amuse-bouche. Where’s the dramatic tension in that?)

With the blessing of befuddled city officials (led by the ever-funny human circle Timothy Spall), Virgil becomes town marshal, with Everett his second in command, powers they use to clear out the mess with much gunplay. But their peripatetic ways look threatened by a parasol-wielding damsel named Ali (Renee Zellweger), who wants a house and a husband and sets her sights on Virgil. She taps into a loneliness the cowboy didn’t know he possessed, but her romantic loyalty is questionable.

Harris the director makes a valiant effort to project a feminist motivation onto Ali’s gallivanting ways. If a man’s currency on the frontier is his gun, a woman’s is her sexuality, and Ali’s survival depends on her only weapon. But the potential of this storyline is unmined, in part because Zellweger plays the character as more horny than trapped.

From left, Virgil Cole (Ed Harris), Allison French (Renee Zellweger) and Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) must deal with no-good rancher Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons) in Appaloosa. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

In fact, the platonic romance between the two men is far more interesting than the one between Zellweger and… anyone. As two aging cowboys sitting on the porch, their fighting done for the day, the friends engage in comedic banter about Virgil’s bad memory and Everett’s good vocabulary (a joke that gets repeated too often). Mortensen glances at Harris with deep affection, but Harris is too bumbling. (This worry wart is the best shot in the west? Really?)

Harris makes the most of the arid location, capturing a certain foreboding in empty land and sky, as if the worst kind of intrusion might upend the beauty at any moment. But the staging is often awkward, like a fussy play; more teacups on trays are carried into rooms in Appaloosa than in Victoria.

Scripted by Harris and Robert Knott from the novel by Robert Parker, Appaloosa suffers the opposite fate of most overstuffed adaptations: it feels stripped bare of any literary pretension and feels inappropriately light. Somehow, Harris has made a western without metaphor, a snapshot of a relationship that’s semi-sweet, but minor.

Appaloosa opens Sept. 17.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCnews.ca.